Tag Archives: guns

Geddy Kramer favored video games set in dystopian worlds. He listened to music with angry lyrics. He dabbled with drugs. He desperately wanted to have sex. He watched porn on his iPhone. He saw a therapist for depression. He grieved, mostly in silence, over his parents’ divorce.

He was an American teenager in the 21st century.

One day in September 2012, Kramer sat in school, quietly mocking his classmates. And plotting to kill them.

“These … idiots have no idea what I’m writing,” Kramer typed into a journal on his phone. “I wish I could kill all of them, but there’s just not enough time and so much to do. And, like Dylan Klebold, I think I’ll have some followers. Maybe a few at least. All I have to say to them is kill those that stand in your way.”

Kramer killed no one in high school. His grasp for notoriety, his attempt to emulate Klebold and Eric Harris, the Columbine High School shooters, didn’t happen until almost a year after he graduated. On April 29, armed with a shotgun and homemade explosives, Kramer shot and wounded six people at the suburban FedEx warehouse where he worked. He was a would-be spree killer who took only one life. His own.

Many rituals follow mass shootings in the United States, prominent among them a search for meaning — for the hidden clues that would somehow make sense of why the shooter snapped; for the missed signals that, if detected in time, might have forestalled the tragedy.

But a close examination of Geddy Kramer’s final months finds no obvious cause for his rampage. It suggests no dramatic descent into madness. And, perhaps most important, it reveals nothing that Kramer did that necessarily would have alerted anyone to the looming assault.

Kramer’s case shows the difficulty of predicting and preventing acts of mass violence, and of understanding what drives its perpetrators. Common traits, including some form of mental illness, tend to define spree killers, experts say, but those same traits also stand out among many more people who never commit a violent act.

“If you predict every isolated, troubled young man is going to perpetrate a mass shooting, you would be wrong thousands of times,” said Jeffrey Swanson, a professor of psychiatry at Duke University’s School of Medicine who studies the nexus between violence and mental illness.

This examination is based in part on 600 pages of police reports, along with 33 compact discs of witness statements, crime scene photographs, and data from Kramer’s phone: text messages, his Internet browsing history, and his electronic journal, sarcastically titled “The Thoughts of a Nobody.”

Kramer’s writings, though often juvenile and profane, betray no delusional thinking or paranoid fixations. Rather, they reflect the banality of adolescence, returning again and again to Kramer’s indignity over how others viewed him — as such a loser that he appeared exactly once as a senior in his high school yearbook — versus his exalted self-image. Certainly, Kramer had problems. But the fact that he responded to them with extreme measures may be all that distinguishes him from any other disaffected 19-year-old.

Kramer left behind two mysteries, equally unsolvable and unnerving: why he harbored such rage, and how he concealed it with such ease before he erupted in violence.

Even before he sexually assaulted a domestic violence victim, before she said he tried to sodomize her with his police-issued pistol, Dennis Krauss was a bad cop.

His record was filled with allegations of misconduct: that he beat a prisoner so severely the man’s brain bled; that he threatened to fabricate charges against a suspect so he could sleep with the man’s wife; that he pressured at least 10 women for sex to avoid arrest. He supposedly called that offer “private community service.”

“He’s a predator, ” said Susan Thornton, the prosecutor who sent Krauss to prison for sexual assault. “I don’t believe people like that ought to go out on the street with guns.”

And yet, Krauss has the right to do exactly that — with the state of Georgia’s blessing.

At a time when public debate over firearms laws often begins and ends at bad guys with guns versus good guys with guns, Georgia is muddying the waters by enabling record numbers of felons to legally re-arm themselves, an investigation by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has found.

The State Board of Pardons and Paroles restored the firearms rights of more than 1,400 felons between 2008 and 2013. Last year alone, the board granted 666 pardons that restored gun rights, a tenfold increase from six years earlier.

At the same time, the board has dramatically increased the proportion of gun-rights pardons going to violent offenders like Krauss, the Journal-Constitution found. In 2008, such offenders received 6 percent of all Georgia gun-rights pardons. By 2013, they accounted for 31 percent.

Of the 358 violent felons who regained their gun rights over the six years, 32 had killed another person and 166 were convicted of drug-related offenses. Forty-four committed sex crimes, including seven who are listed on the state’s sex offender registry.

All are free to buy, sell, own or carry firearms without restriction, as if their crimes had never happened.